No End to Discrimination Against Foreigners by the National Agency for Higher Education

In the beginning of fall semester 2010, The National Agency for Higher Education (in Swedish, Högskoleverket) changed their admission rules. They create different evaluation categories for those who were applying based on Swedish high school grades, those who were applying based on the "högskoleprov" (a country-wide test), those who had previously studied at a "folkhögskola" and those that did not study high school in Sweden. Those with non-Swedish high school grades (excluding those who had studied at International Baccalaureate schools) were put into their own "evaluation category" and, in essence, had to "compete" with those in the other categories for acceptance spots. At least one-third of the spots were reserved for students applying with Swedish high school grades and another one-third was reserved for those who had taken the national exam.

What this meant was that foreigners could easily denied acceptance (regardless of their grades) if enough people with Swedish high school grades and those who had taken the national exam applied. I myself was denied acceptance on the basis of my non-Swedish high school grades. When I found out the reason for this (because it was not clear from the application results, which only stated that I was placed in "Reserve group 2"), I became so upset that I considered leaving Sweden. I was being punished for learning Swedish and applying for a course in which few other non-Swedish people applied. My grades, which couldn't be reckoned with, were never considered. My application was never considered... because I had not studied at a Swedish high school. And it happened to many others too.

Not surprisingly, studera.nu does not have any information about the new acceptance rules in English. Here it is in Swedish.

Swedish people who had graduated high school before 2003 were also punished because the new rules assigned extra points to those who had studied languages starting from 2003. This meant that sought-after programs were shut out to older students. The Swedish press focused mostly on this aspect of discrimination in their coverage of the new admission rules. This was not deemed discrimination - just indirect discrimination. Lund University admirably decided to change their admission rules to admit the foreign students who had been denied admission because they had not studied high school in Sweden - let's give a big applause to them! Other colleges and universities did not follow suit, unfortunately.

I reported this to the Discrimination Ombudsman. I expect it to be a lengthy process. So far all I've gotten is an acceptance of my report and a copy of a questionnaire sent to the college in which I applied to with a deadline in the middle of September. I can only hope that the government will step up and put a stop to this discrimination and that my report will hurry this along.

In the meantime, I can only wonder... what were they thinking?